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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump suggests 2024 presidential bid: 'I'll see you in four years'

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      Donald Trump has floated the idea of running for president again in 2024 at a holiday reception at the White House on Tuesday evening.“It’s been an amazing four years,” Trump told the crowd, which included many Republican National Committee members. “We’re trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”Trump’s comments appeared to acknowledge that he thought he could have lost the election. While speculation about a presidential run in 2024 has been rife, and many US politics watchers expect him to declare a bid soon, he has not spoken publicly about it before.The video was streamed live on Facebook by one attendee of the party, Pam Pollard, who is national committee member for the Oklahoma GOP. The footage showed dozens of people crammed into the Cross Hall of the White House state floor, standing closely together. Many seen in the video were not wearing masks. Coughing could be heard.The Trumps began hosting holiday receptions this week, intent on celebrating a final season before Trump leaves office on 20 January. Trump has not formally conceded, but belatedly allowed the transition to Biden to proceed.According to social media postings reviewed by The Associated Press, the White House Christmas events have featured large crowds of often maskless attendees gathered indoors – violating the very public health guidance the US government has pressed the nation to follow this holiday season as cases of Covid-19 skyrocketed across the country.The White House has been the site of at least one suspected Covid-19 super-spreader event, and dozens of the president’s aides, campaign staffers and allies have tested positive in numerous outbreaks. Trump himself was hospitalized for the virus in October, and the first lady and two of his sons have tested positive. Numerous others have had to quarantine.Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokeswoman and chief of staff, had said last month that the White House would be moving forward with events, “while providing the safest environment possible.” She said that would include smaller guest lists, that “masks will be required and available, social distancing encouraged while on the White House grounds, and hand sanitizer stations throughout the State Floor.”“Attending the parties will be a very personal choice,” she added.The video of Trump discussing the 2024 election emerged as he threatened to veto the $740bn National Defense Authorization Act unless it included a measure eliminating a federal law protecting tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter.“If the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk,” Trump tweeted late on Tuesday.Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects tech companies from liability over content posted by users, and has been under attack from Trump and Republican lawmakers, who have criticized internet platforms’ content moderation decisions and accused them of stifling conservative voices.The sweeping NDAA sets policy for the Department of Defense. It has been passed for six decades, one of the few major pieces of legislation seen as a “must-pass” because it governs everything from pay raises for the troops to how many aircraft should be purchased or how best to compete with rivals like Russia and China.Congressional aides expressed skepticism Trump would actually veto the legislation. Democrats won’t agree to repealing 230 because the 24-year-old law provides a vital protection to social media companies.With Associated Press and Reuters More

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      in US Politics

      Bipartisan group pitches $908bn Covid-19 relief to break deadlock in Congress

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      [embedded content]
      A bipartisan group of US lawmakers on Tuesday unveiled a $908bn Covid-19 relief bill aimed at breaking a months-long deadlock between Democrats and Republicans over new emergency assistance for small businesses, unemployed people, airlines and other industries.
      The measure has not been written into legislation. Nor has it been embraced by the Trump administration, President-elect Joe Biden or leaders in the Senate or House of Representatives, all of whom would be needed for passage.
      But it comes with the backing of a group of conservatives and moderates who claim it will appeal to a broad swath of Congress. Economists and senior government figures, including the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, have warned the US economy is at risk unless Congress acts.
      Lawmakers are hoping to wrap up their work for the year by mid-December but they still have a massive government-funding bill to approve or else risk agency shutdowns starting on 12 December. If the bipartisan coronavirus aid bill gains traction, it could either be attached to the spending bill or advance on a separate track.
      “It would be stupidity on steroids if Congress left for Christmas without doing an interim package,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat.
      Earlier this year, more than $3tn in coronavirus aid was enacted, which included economic stimulus measures and money for medical supplies. But since then negotiations about more aid have stalled in Congress.
      On Tuesday Powell told Congress that the outlook for the US economy was “extraordinarily uncertain” as the rise in Covid-19 cases continues to take an economic toll on the country. The latest monthly jobs report, released on Friday, is expected to show that the pace of recovery in the jobs market is continuing to slow.
      The plan was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference, amid a surge in coronavirus cases, with significant increases in deaths and hospital resources at a breaking point.
      The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, urged quick action on the bipartisan plan as she ticked off business closures mushrooming in her state “during a pretty dark and cold time of year”, with many suffering job losses and “food insecurity”.
      The proposal would provide emergency aid through 31 March, including $228bn in paycheck protection program funds for hotels, restaurants and other small businesses. State and local governments would receive direct aid, the lawmakers said.
      The Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican, appealed for help from Congress, noting in an interview on CBS that his state has more than 5,000 coronavirus patients in hospitals and not enough money to distribute the much-awaited Covid vaccines that are expected to be available beginning this winter.
      US airlines would receive $17bn for four months of payroll support as part of $45bn for the transportation sector that also includes airports, buses and Amtrak passenger rail, according to two people familiar with the plan.
      Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a Republican, said the bill contained $560bn in “repurposed” funding from the Cares Act enacted in March, with the remaining $348bn in new money.
      The measure includes provisions Republicans have been pressing for, including liability protections for businesses and schools. But it is far more expensive than the $500bn that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been advocating.
      The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and her fellow Democrats would win a central demand with the aid to state and local governments, which face layoffs of frontline workers.
      A compromise $300 a week for four months in additional unemployment benefits is in the package, according to the lawmakers. Democrats had been seeking $600.
      Separately, a group of Democratic senators introduced legislation on Tuesday that would extend until October 2021 the $600 a week in jobless benefits for workers who lost their jobs due to Covid-19.
      While it is significantly below the $2.2tn Pelosi sought in her last offer to the White House before the 3 November elections, the $908bn is for a relatively short period, potentially opening the door to additional requests for money once the Biden administration is in place.
      Pelosi and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, were expected to discuss coronavirus aid and the must-pass government funding bill later on Tuesday. More

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      in Elections

      Trump lawyer: ex-election security chief Krebs should be 'taken out and shot'

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      Joe DiGenova condemned for ‘mob attorney’ remark made on podcast shown on conservative Newsmax TVUS politics – live coverageA former head of US election security who said Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden was not subject to voter fraud should be “taken out at dawn and shot”, a Trump campaign lawyer said. Related: Trump’s fraud claims undermine democracy, ex-US election security chief says Continue reading… More

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      Trump’s legacy is the plague of extreme lies. Truth-based media is the vaccine | Richard Wolffe

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      Normal presidents start to think about their legacy long before the final weeks of their time inside the West Wing. But if there’s anything we have learned from the lab rat experiment of the last four years, it’s that Donald Trump is entirely abnormal.Whether he knows it or not – and all the evidence suggests he knows nothing worth knowing – Trump’s legacy is the toxic politics of lies: a permanent campaign of fabrications and falsehoods.No matter that he clearly lost the 2020 election by landslide margins in the electoral college and the popular vote. What matters is the never-ending sense of grievance that someone or something, somewhere – liberals, minorities, judges, reporters – have conspired to wrong Trump and oppress his long-suffering fans.This is the narrative of the fascist story forever: you are not to blame for your suffering because it was contrived by others – immigrants and outsiders, wielding wealth and power in the shadows.Trump did not invent this story and likely has no idea where it came from, other than his own obvious genius. He did not invent the notion that brazen lies can buy you a delusional base. He wasn’t the first to put the bull in the bully pulpit of the presidency.But he was the first to run a White House like a Joe McCarthy witch hunt, unleashing social media to cower an entire party into a posture of pure cowardice.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills of the IRS, the calling-in of his massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud cases of New York state’s prosecutors.These Trumpist Republicans are his legacy, as much as a supreme court stacked against the popular vote, science and all good sense.They are people like Elise Stefanik in upstate New York. Stefanik is a Harvard graduate whose career began alongside Republican moderates such as Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, and Josh Bolten, Bush’s second term chief of staff. But now she’s a full Trumpista, mimicking his campaign style of insults and defending him through his impeachment for corruptly twisting national security to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.They are people like Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator and 2024 presidential hopeful. Cotton is already campaigning against immigrants and says he’ll oppose Biden’s nominee for homeland security because he was part of a giant conspiracy of Democratic donors to sell green cards to the Chinese. In fact the conspiracy involved just three cases, and is the same cash-for-citizenship program that triggered investigations into Trump’s son-in-law and confidant Jared Kushner. But why spoil the soundbite?They are people like Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who spent most of the 2020 campaign sounding like a Trump clone but has now disappeared from public view, even as he continues to stop local officials from enforcing mask-wearing to slow the spread of the pandemic.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills, the massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud casesThis political plague of extreme lies did not start four years ago.George W Bush and Karl Rove won the 2004 election by suggesting that Democrats would open the nation’s doors to Islamist terrorists. That was before the second term was demolished by their own nativists who sunk their plans for immigration reform. Those anti-immigrant forces found a natural home in the so-called Tea party that denied Barack Obama’s citizenship, and later populated Trump’s White House and justice department.The good news is that we already have a vaccine. It’s the best way to protect yourself from demagogues, deception and delusions. It separates fact from fiction. It recalls recent history to place the present in some kind of meaningful context.It’s called the news media, and you can help. You can be an informed citizen by reading established news media first, not your social feed or email. You can share stories from the truth-tellers who have no problem calling out the liars.You can even pay for the truth that journalists deliver every day, no matter how much sewage pours through social media feeds and email inboxes. It doesn’t cost much when you think about how much we’ve paid during these last four years of chaos and corruption.We can’t stop the Trumpistas from Trumping. We can’t stop the rest of them from pretending like they were never big Trump fans in the first place.But we can stop them running away from the facts or their record. We can remind them how they failed to stop Trump’s corruption and this murderous pandemic.We can stop them skewing the political spectrum so far that the Biden team tacks to center ground that is already six steps to the right.We can hold the new White House to its promises at the same time as holding the old Republican party to what used to be its principles.But this work comes at a price. Back in the late 19th century, the French writer Gustave Le Bon wrote that “the crowd” has never rewarded the truth.“They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them,” he wrote. “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”You can reward the truth if you want to. It’s one of the best ways to demolish the legacy of the last four years. More

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      in US Politics

      Congress races to avoid government shutdown amid pandemic as funding expires

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      The US Congress on Monday began a two-week sprint to rescue the federal government from a possible shutdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, the first major test since the election of whether Republicans and Democrats intend to cooperate.Government funding for nearly all federal agencies expires on Saturday 11 December.Congressional negotiators have made progress on how to divvy up around $1.4tn to be spent by 30 September 2021, the end of the current fiscal year, according to a House of Representatives Democratic aide.But more granular details are still unresolved and votes by the full House and Senate on a huge funding bill may come close to bumping up against that 11 December deadline.Still unclear is whether Donald Trump, who was defeated in the 3 November election, will cooperate with the effort.If the post-election “lame duck” session of Congress fails to produce a budget deal, the new Congress convening in January would have to clean up the mess just weeks before the inauguration of Joe Biden.Trump has already warned that he would veto a wide-ranging defense authorization bill Congress aims to pass if a provision is included stripping Confederate leaders’ names from military bases.Failure by the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate to pass a spending bill could have dire consequences. Some healthcare operations could be short-staffed or otherwise interrupted at a time when Covid-19 cases in the US have been surging. Nearly 267,000 people have died in the US as a result of the virus.The spending bill could be the vehicle for providing billions of dollars to state and local governments to help them handle coronavirus vaccines on track to be available in coming weeks and months.Beyond pandemic worries, if government funds were allowed to run out next month, airport operations could slow, national parks would close, some medical research would be put on hold and thousands of other programs would be jeopardized as government workers are furloughed, further hurting the struggling US economy.Washington suffered record-long partial shutdowns between 22 December 2018 and 25 January 2019, the result of a standoff between Democrats and Trump over funding the US-Mexico border wall that was a centerpiece of his presidency.This time around, Republicans are seeking $2bn for the southern barrier that most Democrats and some Republican lawmakers claim is an ineffective remedy to halting illegal immigration.Negotiators also have been battling over the amount of money Republicans want for immigrant detention beds.Disagreements over abortion and family planning, education and environment programs also have been simmering. If they cannot be resolved by 11 December, agency shutdowns could be avoided only by Congress passing a stopgap funding bill.Also hovering over the budget debate will be warnings that emergency funds must be allocated in separate coronavirus aid legislation following months of deadlock.Democrats’ most recent offer was a wide-ranging $2.2tn bill to help state and local governments deal with the health and economic crisis, expand Covid-19 testing and supplies, and renew federal direct payments to individuals and families during the pandemic.Their goal is to provide a significant shot of stimulus to an economy that many experts fear could take a second dive in coming months if the pandemic shuts down more businesses.Republicans have deemed that proposal exorbitant and have been sticking with calls for a scaled-down $500bn menu of initiatives.So far there have been no signs of serious negotiations, leaving many to believe a stimulus bill will be the first order of business in Biden’s presidency, which begins on 20 January. More

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      The 'Freedom Force': Republican group takes on the Squad and 'evil' socialism

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      A group of incoming Republican congresspeople intends to counter the “radical agenda” of the Democratic party, with the self-professed goal of becoming the Republican party’s alternative to “the Squad” – a group of progressive congresswomen of color including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.Calling themselves the Freedom Force, the Republicans say they will combat the “evil” of socialism and Marxism.“We love our nation. This group will be talking against and giving a contrast to the hard left. We have the Freedom Force versus Squad; we have a group of people who believe in our country, believe in God, family, respect for women and authority, and another group who hates everything I just mentioned,” the Utah congressman-elect Burgess Owens told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, speaking as a representative of the Freedom Force.Owens said the group would aim to protect small business owners and the middle class. “Business ownership is the foundation of our freedom,” he said on Fox & Friends Weekend. “It’s where our middle class comes from.” He added that the middle class got its power from small businesses, while the left got its power “from misery”.During the interview, Owens – a former Super Bowl champion – also railed against NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem and against the Green New Deal.He pointed to the diversity within his new coalition. “South Korea, Cuba, Iran, Greece, I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida … We’ve all dealt with the harshness, the evil of socialism and Marxism, and so we can talk from experience,” he said.As a final warning to Democrats, he added: “You’re collateral damage if you run a business and you want to go to church and you want to put your kids in school; you’re collateral damage – that’s the way the evil Marxists and socialists roll.”The coalition of Republican lawmakers includes New York’s Nicole Malliotakis; Michelle Steel of California; Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma; Victoria Spartz of Indiana; and Carlos Giménez, Maria Elvira Salazar and Byron Donalds of Florida. More

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      Can dozens of new Republican congresswomen change the face of the GOP?

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      Kat Cammack was raised on a cattle ranch by a working class single mother. She was the third generation of her family to go into business as a sand blaster. And at 32, she is about to become the youngest Republican woman in the US Congress.“I think a lifetime of experiences has shaped me to be a Republican and a conservative,” said Cammack, elected to an open seat in Florida. “There has been a stereotype about the Republican party, that it was the Grand Old Party, that it was your grandfather’s political party of choice. The election in 2020 has definitely helped push back on that narrative.”Of the 12 seats in the House of Representatives that Republicans have flipped from Democratic control so far this year, nine were won by women, two by Latino men and one by an African American man. The trend represents a conscious effort by a party still dominated by white men: diversify or die.It also reflects the complexities of America’s voting demographics, which saw Trump make gains among Latinos in states such as Florida and Texas, win a majority of white women for the second time and improve his standing among African Americans. The counterintuitive data have been seen as a wake-up call for Democrats.Cammack argues that the Republican party was a natural choice for her after watching her mother try to run a small business while fending off intrusions from big government, and after the family lost their small cattle ranch in 2011 “due to an Obama-era housing programme”.She recalls: “That was really the turning point in my life where you find yourself homeless, you had a life plan and all of a sudden that is completely out the window and you have to make a choice. Do I put my head back in the sand? Do I rebuild my life and keep going down the path that I had envisioned for myself? Or do I do a hard right and get involved and try to fix the system?”Cammack duly went into politics at district and federal level and, seven years later, ran for Florida’s 3rd congressional district. She was endorsed as a “rising star” by E-Pac, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women.A vocal supporter of Donald Trump, Cammack believes that Republicans’ pitch as the party of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, struck a chord whereas Democrats pushed a “government will take care of you” narrative and took some groups for granted. “Biden had several gaffes: most notably he said, ‘If you don’t vote Democrat then you’re not Black.’ What kind of ridiculous nonsense is that?“In 2016, I took heat from the left that because I was a young woman and I wasn’t supporting Hillary Clinton, I was a traitor of some sort. That is the most un-American, stereotypical sexist, racist nonsense I’ve ever heard. You should never discount someone’s individuality and basically say that they can only vote one way or for one party because they check a box.”When Cammack met other newly elected members of Congress earlier this month and swapped notes about their winning campaigns, she recalled, they all cited issues such as healthcare, the coronavirus and the economy. “We never once went out and said, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ or ‘Vote for me because I’m a millennial’.“It was always, ‘Vote for me because I’m the best person for the job and here’s why,’ and that is what is resonating with people. I think this narrative that if you are African American or if you are a minority or if you’re a woman you have to vote Democrat couldn’t be further from the truth and the results from this election prove that.”The Republican recruitment drive is starting from a low base. Eighteen months ago, just 13 of the party’s 197 House members were women. By contrast, 89 of 235 House Democrats were women and nearly 90 were Black or Latino. There is only one Black Republican in the Senate: Tim Scott of South Carolina.John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “They’re still basically a lily-white party and they’re still a male-centered party, but let’s see if this is a formula for them. Frankly, if they have any hope at all, this is the only formula.”At least 36 Republican women will join the next Congress, beating the party’s record of 30 set in 2006. Of these, 28 will serve in the House, including at least 17 newcomers, based on results so far. Stephanie Bice, an Iranian American in Oklahoma, María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American in Florida, and Michelle Steeland Young Kim, both Korean Americans in California, all defeated Democratic incumbents. More